More than half of Justin Bieber's Twitter followers are fake

Los Angeles: A study suggests that out of 'Baby' singer Justin Bieber's 37.3 million followers, only 17.8 million are true Beliebers. SocialBakers reveals that nearly half of 37 million accounts following Bieber are fake and inactive. According to the social media statistic, the 19-year-old Canadian singer only has about 17.8 million real and active followers.

According to reports, SocialBakers spots fake accounts by looking at the number of followers and seeing if genuine tweets have been posted, rather than spam.

A study suggests that out of Justin Bieber's 37.3 million followers, only 17.8 million are true Beliebers.

The data also considers fake accounts to continuously tweet buzz phrases such as "diet", "make money" and "work from home."

"With a huge celebrity Twitter account of this size and age it is completely normal to have between 20-50 percent of followers who are inactive or fake," Maje Crumpton, a spokesperson for Socialbakers, said in a statement.

"A high percentage of fans are likely to start accounts to follow celebrities and then stop using them. Of course, the larger the amount of followers, the harder it is to keep track of and remove inactive followers. You will no doubt see a similarly high numbers of inactive followers on any abnormally large celebrity Twitter account," he added.